On Thursday 11 January 2001 5:08 am, James W. Lindenschmidt wrote: > Greetings, everyone. > > I just migrated from RedHat over to Debian potato and I'm thrilled > so far. > > But, I think my boot disk is defective, since it takes 5-7 minutes > for the > > Loading Linux.............. > > process to complete from /dev/fd0 before Linux actually boots. I > suspect I have a bad floppy, and I want to make a new boot floppy. > > I've tried going back into dbootstrap to make it from there, but it > won't work. It says my disk is either write protected or I'm not > using the first disk drive, despite the fact that /dev/fd0 whirs > before I get this error message. I've tried 5 different newly > formatted disks, and I always get this error. > > Is there any other way to make a boot disk? I need to use this > temporarily until I can install LILO.
This was a problem I encountered when first installing Slink. It also occurs when I first installed Potato. What gives a dramatic improvement in booting speed for me is to re-compile the kernel (#make config, #make dep, #make clean, and #make bzdisk). Up to now, I've always booted from floppies and kernels as supplied are not quite what I need so recompiling is desirable. My booting time now is to the order of 40secs - on first install it was similar to your experience (just over 6mins). John.
